As I mentioned in my last post, I went on a week-long bikepacking tour along the Lost Coast in Humboldt County a couple weeks ago (pictures here for those interested). I found the bike tour to be a surprisingly spiritual experience, so I wanted to share a bit about my experience. I realize that “spiritual” […]
Category: religion
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
Amazon link This book had been making the rounds last year, and everybody who had read it recommended it (including Bill Gates), so I was happy to finally get it from the library. Subtitled A Brief History of Humankind, Sapiens traces the rise of humans from prehistoric hunter gatherers to world-dominating titans. What I like […]
Optimization Multiplicity
Religion fascinates me. I am not religious myself, but I sometimes yearn to be. It’s fashionable among the intellectual set to disparage religion, especially when the discussion is political, but having grown up in a religious town, I try to stay away from that (not always successfully). I knew lots of good people whose faith […]
The fundamental interconnectedness of all things
DocBug wrote up a great post, discussing how he has been trying to “translate” the spiritualistic beliefs of some of his friends “into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.” I think this is a fascinating topic, because I’ve been on a similar journey. The more I learn, the more […]
Creationism
I don’t know why I let it get to me. But the arguments of creationists just aggravate me so much whenever I see them that I feel compelled to post about it. This morning’s aggravation was a result of coming across a link to a pointed criticism of an article by Phyllis Schlafly, where she […]
The Passion of the Christ
I went to see Mel Gibson’s new film The Passion of the Christ over the weekend, mostly because I want to see anything that engenders this much controversy so that I can form my own opinion. Plus, the Christ story (“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever […]
New vs. the Old Testament
(written 11/12/03) Whee. Short post. Too much going on in life (chorus rehearsal last night, salsa class tonight). Maybe another long post tomorrow. While I’m on the general anti-religion bashing theme, I was chatting with a friend about the people who think that the Bible is the literal word of God. The interesting bit to […]
Evil cults
(written 11/10/03) This is going to be a rant. It’s not a reasoned discussion, it’s not an unbiased look at the facts, it’s pretty much just a rant. Go with it. It started with a friend of a friend trying to drag people to a Landmark Forum event, raving about how it had changed their […]